nd drums, and the singing of old French
Psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled
cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and sometimes at night,
or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged
treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their foes. There, a
hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, "Count and Lord
Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France," grave, silent,
imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his
wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a
genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at
fifty-five the English Governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a
partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for
controversial divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take
counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels
or slept in an unguarded camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts!
And there, to follow these and other leaders, was the rank and file of
prophets and disciples, bold, patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon
the mountains, cheering their rough life with psalms, eager to fight,
eager to pray, listening devoutly to the oracles of brain-sick children,
and mystically putting a grain of wheat among the pewter balls with
which they charged their muskets.

I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of
nothing more notable than the child-eating Beast of Gevaudan, the
Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of
a romantic chapter--or, better, a romantic footnote--in the history of
the world. What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told
that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant
resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery
parlour. But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively
and generous tradition. Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people
are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than
charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and
reprisal--in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the
Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic
peasantry into legalized revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard
and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains?

Just on the brow of the hill, wh